Hi all,I recently found myself in this awkward situation: just a few days ago I got an email from a professor saying that he's interested in taking me on as a phd student, the school/department is definitely one of the best and I'm currently doing masters there, the phd topic will be something on quant finance, and the professor is very good. But the trouble is, I've already accepted a desk quant position at a large bank, and when I accepted it I didn't know when/if I will get the phd offer.What should I do? Is it usual/easy for people to work fulltime for a year, then go somewhere to do a phd? From my understanding banks don't like that because it cost them a lot (time & money) to bring people on board and train them. I always wanted to work as a quant (definitely enjoyed my time as an intern), and plan to stay working as a quant for quite some time once settled, but at the same time I always wanted to do a phd as well. From your experience, is there anything I could possibly later regret not getting a phd when I'm still not too old?Love to hear your views. Thanks in advance!

First of all, what sort of quant job is it? Is the role a juicy one that you aspire to have? Can you get something even better if you do a PhD?Secondly, how important is having the "Dr." title to you?

You have to ask yourself why you want a PhD if you already got a quant job. What do you want to do after getting a PhD degree?If you plan to work in academia, PhD is a must. If you want to stay in the industry, PhD may help propel you to a senior position more easily considering thereare so many PhDs in the industry. Of course PhD is a long-term investment while your quant job now will give you a handsome cashflow soon. It all depends on your preference. Another thing to consider is you may forget a lot of materials after working in the industry for a while. Then, you will have a hard time doing a phd later on.

it's a front office role, hopefully i'll be working with some experienced quants on model development, i'm prepared to do a lot of coding to start with, but I do hope to participate in the "brainstorming" when i'm a bit more experienced, not sure if a phd would speed up the transition though..the "Dr." doesn't mean a lot to myself (i think it's nice to have one though), i'm just worried that it might mean something to people who could have an impact on my career like my boss.

What is the PhD in ?

We haven't agreed on a topic yet, but I guess it will fall in the general category of derivative pricing & hedging, possibly with a bias towards computational methods. The professor is an expert in stochastic optimization, so maybe I will have a flavor of that in my PhD too.

Clearly that's not a bad area.It's just such a hard call. Did the bank actually tell you there would be a lot of coding ?

Yes, I was told I could be spending a large proportion of time coding (this is actually something I'm likely to enjoy, to an extend), but I'm assured that I'll be learning more about model building, in other words this is definitely not a developer job.

The PhD sounds good. I think you should do it then. If you already have a job offer even before getting one, I'm sure you'll have no problems getting one after it. The PhD might give you more juicy job options too.

Thanks for the advice. I've decided to go with the job (I've already accepted the offer anyway) as I think I'll learn much faster in that environment, but I'll talk to the professor to see if I can defer the phd for a few years, just to keep my options open.

Good luck with the job -- sounds like it's a good position